Well, I admit it, I judged tablet PCs without actually trying one.
But now .........!
I never thought I would use something running Win XP to read my PDF files, but with the attention the iPad got , I looked at couple of posts in mobileread that describe a variety of low end tablets, those include the Archos , and many other by China/Taiwan based manufacturers (by the way many now run on Windows 7 , Android/Linux and a Windows CE - you heard me right CE which looks almost like windoes 95/98)
But again what operating system can run all books formats, yep, Windows XP.
I resisted the temptation of getting something "small and mobile" because my iPod is, didn't want to get 5", 7" , 9.7" or even 10" (I already have this on my netbook and it is not good enough) my iPod provide pocketibilty , I want something that displays a full A4 page comfortably.
I tried to avoid anything new and unheard of , so i went with .... motion computing , a company built by engineers from HP or Dell I can't remember in 2001, it only makes high grade tablet PCs, for businesses and professionals.
got a great bargain on one from ebay, have no problem mentioning his user name (he knows what he is doing and his advice saved my life) his handle on ebay is fun13bobby.
the tablet I got is an older model , rugged, is quiet, less than an inch thick, bluetooth , wireless and all, most importantly it got 12" screen. AMAAAZZIINGG when it is in portrait mode. like seteve jobbs says, you can see the whole website, I can see the whole page!
battery life is 2 hours but I do most of the reading at home or on my desk.
One thing, I think a bump bag is very important, being that big it's easy to drop!
I have a big collection of books, so the tablets being sold with 2GB hard drives are not for me, no one SD card reasonably priced today can hold all my collections + Audio + video.
uptil now the only devices I have that do not choke on large PDFs are my iPod/iPhone and my tablet, mind you that iPod choked on one 27MB plain text file, so it seems the trick is in the Goodreader App (it) loads one page at a time from the document, not the whole document.
There are also a No. of applications for tablet PC, that I will have to explore for annotation on documents.
I would of liked my tablet to weigh less, I am not sure if I prefer this screen or a touch screen, myabe because I am just used to my iPod that I find learning to use a digitizer stylus/pen a chore.
in all I got what I was looking for a large screen to display my PDFs and a stable and familiar platform.
The website for Motion Computing is
http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/index.asp
PRS700